Conventionally, a communications receiver employs an adaptive decision feedback equalizer (DFE) to compensate for changes in a communications channel. However, the use of a DFE introduces "error propagation" effects in the receiver. As such, it is known in the art to implement a precoder with modulo arithmetic (e.g., Tomlinson filter) in a remote transmitter in order to mitigate, if not eliminate, the problem of error propagation in the receiver This conventional precoder uses coefficient values generated by the receiver during an initialization phase, sometimes referred to as a training or a start-up phase.
However, if the response, i.e., characteristics, of the communications channel changes significantly, the precoder will fail to adequately compensate for the new communications channel. As a result, a disruptive retrain is usually required so that the receiver can generate a new set of precoder coefficients., which is then sent back to the transmitter. Unfortunately, each retrain disrupts the data flow and takes time to both calculate the equalizer coefficients and to communicate them back to the remote transmitter.